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Bootstrapping Turkish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| nancydowns Senior Member United States Joined 3924 days ago 184 posts - 288 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written) | Message 25 of 54 02 April 2014 at 3:55am | IP Logged | ||
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I love this! It is almost like being an investigator of the language, like Sherlock Holmes of languages. You are using clues that you have and
making deductions and refining your deductions as you get more clues. So Cool! :-) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5132 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 26 of 54 02 April 2014 at 6:09pm | IP Logged | ||
There’s definitively a bit of Sherlock Holmes in it :) But most of the time words and grammar insights just emerge on their own. I read something and all of a sudden the (usually non-verbal) thought ‘Oh, wow, that must mean X’ pops in my mind. Our brains are amazing pattern-recognition machines, and I just need to lean back and let my brain do the heavy lifting. I’m also drawing on it’s heavily parallel set-up… all those words and structures are in various stages of comprehensibility, growing additional layers of meaning on every new encounter. But, of course, there’s also a lot of back and forth, forgetting and rediscovering, and misinterpretation going on. It’s very playful, though, and makes my studies really fun. I love figuring things out. Thanks for stopping by! 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4870 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 27 of 54 02 April 2014 at 6:41pm | IP Logged | ||
I sort of feel the same about Korean (which is probably fairly similar in complexity). While I did study grammar at the beginning, I've been ignoring a lot of forms for the past 2 years of individual study with native materials and it hasn't hindered my understanding a lot. I do intend to study them all with a grammar book now to get a better grasp on them and to learn how exactly I can use them. That's the method I favor - lots of input first and when words, phrases and grammatical constructions already seem familiar I study them explicitly. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5132 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 28 of 54 02 April 2014 at 8:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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Sounds like a good method. It’s much easier to appreciate grammar points you can relate back to experience.
I was wondering how similar Korean is to Turkish in terms of complexity. I’d guess that all agglutinative languages share certain features, like a zoo of noun and verb forms, endings where we have prepositions etc. What I heard makes Korean very difficult, however, is the intricate system of registers, something I hope (and believe) is not an issue in Turkish. At some point in the future I need to engage in a bit of comparative studies, agglutination is a really cool concept :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4049 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 29 of 54 02 April 2014 at 10:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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You're inspiring me an experiment to do with Dutch.
I'm something around a1 and I am also studying German so it's not a bootstrap, not completely. I have two novels written in Dutch. By reading guessing meanings along the way I should reach similar results as you. That was my original plan but the application was wrong since I was looking up every word I didn't know instead of continue reading. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5132 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 30 of 54 05 April 2014 at 9:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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@Tristano: Good on you :) Extensive reading / reading for pleasure is a proven technique to pick up loads of vocabulary without looking anything up. I'll be checking your log to see how you fare with this approach.
This morning, I had my first session with my Turkish tutor. I actually bought a fourth Wimmelbuch, Ein Jahr in Wimmelhausen. If you follow the link, you can see one example page (the third page of the preview) and some cover pages. The cover pages are not typical for the book, but that one page is. The book contains 12 double pages, one for each month. It shows the life of a small community over a period of one year, featuring the same characters month after month. I very much like the style of the pictures, they’re cute, with attention to detail, and depict a large number of different things. Of all the Wimmelbuch books I’ve seen so far it’s my favorite. My tutor did a great job, and I’ve got my first 90 minutes of custom-made Turkish audio! She immediately got the idea and went right into it. Speaking clearly and calmly, but entirely naturally from what I can tell, she described the many things that are in the picture. I asked her to go from left to right and from top to bottom so that I can more easily follow the recording later on, and she mostly did that. Sometimes she made references back to people or objects already discussed (comparing shapes, colors, properties etc.) which was useful as well. I understood a lot, maybe around 50%. Sometimes only individual words, sometimes entire sentences. I recognized lots of words from my science books, words like cat and dog, box, house, colors, snow, tree, star, trash, glass, bottle etc. I learned many new words like candle, wall, sleeve, stripe, to sit, open, closed, body parts, clothes etc. which I hopefully will consolidate over the course of the coming week. I picked up a bit of grammar, too, in particular markers of negation and sentence formation patterns. My plan is to listen to the recording at least twice (which takes three hours) before our next session. I think this is a great technique which can be used even by total beginners. It’s already now an amazing feeling to listen to Turkish and actually getting the gist of it, just 5 weeks into the language. I know from my experience with Thai that this will get much, much better in a few sessions when more and more of the standard vocabulary sinks in and new words start to stand out. Apart from that, I’ve continued working through my books. I’m now in cycle 2, book 20 out of 29. I’ll do at least one more cycle through the same set of books, there’s still so much to discover... 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| renaissancemedi Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Greece Joined 4360 days ago 941 posts - 1309 votes Speaks: Greek*, Ancient Greek*, EnglishC2 Studies: French, Russian, Turkish, Modern Hebrew | Message 31 of 54 05 April 2014 at 9:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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Great Bakunin! It seems your methods are working :) I think you are what they call a global learner: after a reasonable amount of chaos, suddenly it all starts to make sense.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5534 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 32 of 54 05 April 2014 at 9:48pm | IP Logged | ||
Well, I don't avoid grammar entirely. But I basically use Assimil lessons as comprehensible input, and the only French grammar book I read before taking my B2 exam took me about 3 hours. Other than that, I mostly just look stuff up online if I'm curious about something I encountered. I personally find that there's no real difference between naturally comprehensible input, and input that was comprehensible after a bit of Googling, except that the latter is slower. :-) Don't be fooled by those Egyptian glosses in my log; those look like grammar-translation, but I'm making up the grammar as I go along, confusing the various sDm=f verb tenses, and generally being grossly irresponsible. I find this vastly preferable to reading actual Egyptian grammar books, which are often ridiculously terrifying—which is odd, because Egyptian seems like a relatively sensible and logical language, just one with some odd verb forms. I have great faith that my Egyptian will eventually sort itself out with enough exposure and a bit of Googling, just like my French did. So even if relatively few people here just pick up native materials on day 1 and dive in, your approach is certainly not too far out of the mainstream. And I just want to say that your log is completely awesome, and you make Turkish sound like a lot of fun. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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